Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, a leading Japanese shipping company, has announced its plans to join the “Consortium to develop trade data sharing platform using blockchain technology”.

The consortium, comprising of 14 trade-related companies across banking, insurance, total logistics providers, and export/import companies, has NTT DATA Corporation serving as the administrative office. It aims to explore practical ways to use blockchain technology to streamline the flow of trade information.

“Current trading practices rely heavily on bills of lading and other documents. This creates burdens such as additional time to complete procedures and requires additional labor and costs,” MOL said.

“This program aims to increase convenience for customers by using blockchain technology to make information flow more smoothly through corporations and across business categories and making trade-related office procedures swifter and more efficient.”

The consortium marks Japan’s first initiative on using blockchain technology on trade-related operations and is set to launch on August 30, 2017.

“This consortium is designed to explore solutions to the challenges in trade procedures between businesses, across industries and national boundaries as well as to conduct POCs for enhancing efficiency and reliability in trade procedures using blockchain”, NTT Data said.

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